


i will see your body bare (and still i will live here)

by headaaches



Series: university au [2]
Category: Frankenstein & Related Fandoms, Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Coming Out, Gender Dysphoria, Insomnia, M/M, Nonbinary Character, Nonbinary Henry Clerval, Pre-Relationship, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, Trans Victor Frankenstein, set in zav's uni au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-06 00:47:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20498114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/headaaches/pseuds/headaaches
Summary: tw for dysphoria talk and transphobia mentions (nothing explicitly shown)more victry because i can't stop myself sdfshgsfd





	i will see your body bare (and still i will live here)

**Author's Note:**

> tw for dysphoria talk and transphobia mentions (nothing explicitly shown)
> 
> more victry because i can't stop myself sdfshgsfd

It’s fuck-off-o’clock in the morning. Henry’s too lazy to check the clock. He should be asleep, but he can’t sleep, and he’s tried everything. His eyes land on the full laundry basket. Fuck it, he thinks. I might as well be productive if I’m not going to be sleeping. 

He drags himself out of bed and tries to tame the mess of hair on his head, knowing all too well that he won’t succeed. It takes at least an hour to look presentable, and he doesn’t have that kind of time. Well, he does, but he’s not going to bother with his hair when it’s… 

“What time is it?” he says aloud, picking up his phone. 3:47, according to it.

He’s not going to bother with his hair at 3:47 in the morning. Not when he isn’t going to see anybody for about 3 more hours. It isn’t worth the effort.

The room is dark and the window is open and the curtains are blowing in the chilly November wind. Victor, thank god, is nowhere to be found. He doesn’t feel like explaining to his roommate why he’s going to do his laundry at this ungodly hour, especially when they’ve barely talked. 

He can practically imagine the interaction now.  _ Oh, yeah, sorry Victor, just going to do my laundry because of my debilitating insomnia, no big deal. Want to go to breakfast together once the dining halls are actually open and it’s not, like, four in the morning?  _ He almost laughs, then remembers there are other people on this floor that are most likely asleep, and covers his mouth. 

There’s still a little bit of detergent on the communal Laundry Stuff Shelf, so he grabs it and puts the bottle in the basket. He doesn’t want to deal with carrying it and the basket itself, and even if it spills, it was going on the clothes anyway, so why bother? 

Throwing on a jacket and a pair of socks, he slides on the Crocs his sisters bought him as a joke one Christmas, because no one’s going to be in the laundry rooms at 3:47 in the morning, so why bother? That’s kind of his life motto at this point, he thinks as he unlocks the door and closes it behind him, carefully balancing his laundry on his knee.  _ Why bother. _ They could write it on his gravestone once he dies from lack of sleep. Henry Clerval, 2000-2019. Why bother. 

The only other person awake at this hour is Devon from his History of Poetry class, who’s playing some obscure indie game in the floor lounge. He looks up for a moment and then looks back down at the controller, then immediately looks back up at Henry.

“Are those—”

“They’re Crocs, yeah.” He’s too tired to elaborate. 

“Fuck, man, I can’t judge.” He gestures to the mismatched slippers on the floor. “One of these is definitely mine and one of these is definitely my roommate’s, but I have no fucking idea whose is whose and I’m honestly too afraid to ask at this point.” 

“Yeah.” Henry shifts the laundry in his arms and brushes back his hair, sighing.

“Okay, I hate to ask, but why are you doing laundry at four in the morning?”

Henry sighs. “Couldn’t sleep. I figured I’d be productive instead of, like, just laying there and hoping the sleep gods will have mercy on me or whatever.”

“Smart. I’m just here.”

There’s an awkward pause. Henry nods, uncomfortable, and side-steps over to the door, ready to leave the conversation but not wanting to be too rude. 

“I should probably—”

“Yeah, go ahead. I won’t keep you.” 

Henry manages to get the door open with surprisingly little struggle and heads downstairs, pausing at the bottom to check his phone. 4:06 AM, no texts, not even a spam email from Amazon or whatever. He sighs and kicks the handle on the building’s exit door to get it open. 

The quad is, unsurprisingly, quite empty. There’s a couple of squirrels trying to murder each other, but that’s normal. 

There’s something that looks to be either a pile of chairs or an art installation in the middle of the quad. Maybe both. It wasn’t there before he went to bed—or tried to, at least—so it’s probably new. Somebody’s standing beside it with a flashlight. They hear the door close and direct the light at him.

“Hey! What are you—” They pause. “Oh. Sorry. Carry on.” They make an encouraging gesture with the flashlight and return to examining the chair-sculpture. 

He shrugs it off and makes his way to the laundry building with very little difficulty and lets himself in, dragging his basket down the stairs behind him. The lights are on, though that’s not surprising, and the door is open, which is actually surprising. 

The machines are mostly open. There's only one occupied machine right now, actually. Someone is sitting in front of it, knees pulled up to their chest, staring at the machine through shaggy black bangs and large round glasses and  _ of all the fucking people for him to run into. _

Victor doesn't appear to notice him. He tries to work as quietly as possible, pulling open the washing machine door and depositing his quarters. He gets all the way to putting in the detergent before the cap falls out of his hands.

It's like that scene from Mission Impossible. He can physically feel himself panic as the cap falls, slow-motion style, onto the floor with an incredibly loud sound. Much louder than a tiny plastic thing has any right to make.

"Fuck," Henry says aloud, because there's no point in hiding it anymore. To his surprise, Victor doesn't react, just picks his head up from where it was, hidden in his arms, and Henry watches him carefully for a moment before he realizes his eyes are red and he's crying.

He practically drops the detergent bottle as he runs over to Victor, looking down at him. He's got something that looks like it tore in the wash in his hands, and looks incredibly upset by it.

"Are you okay?" he says quietly, putting his hand on Victor's back. Victor flinches, pulling away from Henry with a panicked look in his eyes. 

"Why are you here?" Victor says, voice trembling and much higher than usual. 

"I couldn't sleep and I wanted to—why are  _ you _ here?" Henry says, running his hands gently over Victor's back, and God, he can feel the shaking in Victor's body. "It's okay, breathe, please breathe." 

"I can't—" Henry feels him shaking again, lurching forward and looking as if he's about to throw up. 

"Victor, please, relax," Henry says, putting his arms around him tightly. He feels something—straps, maybe?—under Victor's shirt, but doesn't pay attention to it. His friend comes first. 

"I'm—I'm sorry," Victor says, pressing closer to Henry and leaning down on Henry's shoulder. He seems much smaller than usual, and that's saying something. Victor is practically a foot shorter than him normally. Now he looks like a kid. 

He's crying still, and Henry is powerless to stop it, no matter how much he tries. Victor is tiny and shaking and he looks like he's been crying for a long time. 

"Do you want to tell me what's wrong?" Henry asks quietly, his hands moving from Victor's back to his hair and gently running his hands through it in a futile attempt to comfort him.

"No," Victor says—it's high and reedy and very, very quiet. "I don't."

"That's okay," Henry says, and he leans his head down on Victor's head, watching the laundry spin and spin and spin. 

It's five minutes—Henry watches the laundry timer tick down to keep track of time—before Victor speaks again.

"I—I need to buy a new binder. It ripped in the wash and it's going to take at least a week to get a new one and I'm going to have to go to class in—" Victor is breathing incredibly hard, and has his arms crossed  _ very _ tightly across his chest. "I can't, Henry, I can't do it, I'm going to fucking  _ die _ if I have to go out in front of people like this—" 

Henry wraps his arms around Victor even tighter, practically rocking him at this point. "It's going to be okay, you're going to be okay," he says quietly into Victor's hair, feeling him shudder as his hands accidentally brush against his chest. "You have the whole weekend to wait, and then you can skip a couple days of class if you need to. And there's always sports bras, if you have any, as a last resort. I can get your notes for you, too, just tell me what class to drop into and I'll ask some of the people there for their stuff and copy it out for you."

Victor wipes his eyes with the sleeve of his hoodie. "Why are you being so—so weirdly good about this?" 

"Because you're my friend," Henry says, confused. "And I care about you. This is almost good, actually, you've been binding way too much. I've never seen you without it, even when you're sleeping, and from what I know about binders, that's really not good."

"I don't—I thought you'd be upset with me if I was openly, um—"

"Victor, you actually thought I was transphobic?" 

Saying it so bluntly makes Victor flinch. He looks almost ashamed. "I assumed that you were just—you're so, um, like, weirdly perfect, and you're just kind of really scary sometimes? Like, I'm scared of you?" Seeing Henry's expression, he tries to fix things. "Not like I thought you would  _ hurt  _ me or anything, I just—perfect straight cis guy and me, there's a lot of differences—"

Henry actually laughs out loud. "Okay, literally every descriptor you just used for me was wrong. I'm far from perfect, I'm quite possibly the gayest person alive, and I—" 

This is the weird part, he thinks as he takes a deep breath. "I don't know what I am. I use he/him pronouns still, you can use those for me, but I, uh, I like they? That works too?" He smiles awkwardly at Victor, who looks halfway to crying again. "So I guess nonbinary is what you would call me. Probably."

"I thought I was—I feel kind of crazy right now," Victor says, a breathy, panicked laugh escaping him. "Actually? Like, you're not just making fun of me?"

"Who would—" Henry pauses, taking a deep breath. "That's incredibly fucked up." 

The laundry machine dings from behind him. Victor's stopped a while ago. With one arm still around Victor, he stands, leaving Victor to collect his laundry as he gathers his own. It takes a few moments, but he and Victor finally head out into the incredibly early morning. 

As they walk back to the dorm, the sky starts to lighten. Victor looks up at it through his half-broken glasses, shifting his laundry in his arms. "It's really early, isn't it," he says, rubbing his eyes.

"Yeah. We have, like, two hours until breakfast, I think."

"Or we could just skip and try to sleep," Victor says, a yawn escaping him. 

"No. You're bad enough at eating as it is, I refuse to enable you." 

Victor sighs and leans towards the door, touching his ID card to the reader and pulling the door open. He holds it open for Henry with a shy smile.

"Thanks," he says, walking up the stairs towards their dorms and unlocking their room. "Here. Try to sleep for a little while, and we'll go to breakfast together. You can't skip any more meals." 

Victor sighs and takes off his glasses, collapsing into bed and tucking his knees up to his chest. 

"You're not binding, are you?"

"I don't have a binder right now," Victor says, pointing to the torn-open remains of it laying sadly in his laundry basket. "Remember?"

"That's not the only way to bind," Henry says warningly, looking at Victor until he sighs and sits up. 

"I'm not binding. Don't expect me to prove it to you, neither of us want to see that." His voice cracks as he says it, and he winces. "Yeah. No. I'm not wearing anything underneath this, so I'm not taking it off." He gestures to his hoodie, which falls slightly differently around his chest than usual. Proof enough for Henry not to pester Victor about binders any more.

He watches Victor as he curls up under his blankets, closing his eyes. There aren't many opportunities for him to see Victor looking peaceful, and he's glad for this one.

That peace lasts for all of three seconds before Victor starts crying again, this time more quietly, stifled by the blanket he has covering his mouth. Henry sits up almost instantly, practically running over to Victor and sitting on the bed beside him. Victor sits bolt upright, pressing up to Henry almost instinctively, his whole body shaking. Henry is careful that, as he draws him closer into his arms, he does not touch Victor's chest. 

"I forgot about what my mom said," Victor says, wiping his eyes. "I checked my texts from her before—I never look at them, I don't know why I decided to check them, it was stupid of me, but she—" He takes a sharp breath in, pressing a hand to his forehead. "I don't know how, but she found out I changed my name legally, and she sent me this  _ awful  _ message—" 

He takes out his phone and shows Henry the text.

"Victor, it's—"

"In Chinese." He sighs, shaking his head, and pulls up a translator app, copy-pasting it into the app and then showing Henry. 

Oh God, it's quite possibly the most awful thing he had read. Ever. It breaks the record he'd set with the TERF website, even the partially-joking presentation someone had done in high school. That could have been because it was also full of personal attacks, and deadnamed Victor several times, which Henry ignores as best he can. He wordlessly hands back the phone, and Victor locks it, practically throwing the phone onto the floor. 

"You, um, are you okay?"

Victor nods. Then shakes his head. He reaches for Henry and takes his hand.

"Do you want me to stay here until, uh, breakfast, I guess?"

Victor nods again, burying his face in Henry's chest. Henry can't move. He can't talk. He can't do anything. All he can do is sit with Victor in his arms, and his heart beating much faster than usual. It's both awful and wonderful, and he doesn't know what it is about having his roommate here that he barely knows, that he's barely spoken to, that trusts him enough to confess that he's trans— 

_ Oh. _

With that absolutely terrifying thought, he watches the sun rise, trying to come to terms with feelings in his head and the boy to which those feelings were very tightly attached, half-asleep in his arms.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you very much for reading! this is set in the same universe as the other (you can tell by the matching mitski titles lmao) and there is more to come in that universe soon...
> 
> as always, comments and kudos are much appreciated!


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